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H-Diplo Roundtable Review
www.h-net.org/~diplo/roundtables
Volume XIV, No. 9 (2012)
26 November 2012
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Copyright (c) 2012 H-Net: Humanities and Social Sciences Online.
H-Net permits the redistribution and reprinting of this work for
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editorial staff at h-diplo@h-net.msu.edu.
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Roundtable Editors: Jonathan Winkler and Diane Labrosse
Roundtable Web/Production Editor: George Fujii
Commissioned for H-Diplo by Jonathan Winkler
Introduction by Jonathan Reed Winkler, Wright State University
Jeffrey R. Macris. The Politics and Security of the Gulf: Anglo-American
Hegemony and the Shaping of a Region. New York: Routledge, 2010. ISBN:
978-0-415-77871-8 (paper, $44.95).
Stable URL:
http://www.h-net.org/~diplo/roundtables/PDF/Roundtable-XIV-9.pdf
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Contents
Introduction by Jonathan Reed Winkler, Wright State University 2
Review by Simon Davis, Bronx Community College, City University of New
York 4
Review by Mark Rice, Minnesota State University, Mankato 8
Review by David F. Winkler, Naval Historical Foundation 11
Author's Response by Jeffrey R. Macris, United States Naval Academy 14
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Introduction by Jonathan Reed Winkler, Wright State University
Though a larger war continues in several other locations, the final
withdrawal of United States combat forces from Iraq in December 2011
brought to a close one of the longest-running military theaters the United
States has entered. But the U.S. military has not left the Persian Gulf.
The U.S. Navy's Fifth Fleet remains headquartered in Bahrain, and U.S.
Central Command maintains its forward base at Al Udeid Air Base in Qatar.
In light of the tensions with Iran over its nuclear program and its
January 2012 threats to close the Straits of Hormuz at the entrance to the
Gulf, U.S. military involvement in the region is certain not to end in the
near term but will remain a key component of regional diplomacy for some
time to come.
How did the United States get to this point? The immediate explanations,
of course, draw from the 2001 terrorist attacks by Al Qaeda and the 2003
invasion of Iraq, however one connects the two. But no explanation of
Iraq in 2003 is satisfactory without going back to 1990-1991, and doing
that necessitates at least a mention of the Iran-Iraq War (1980-1988), the
Carter Doctrine and the Iranian revolution of 1979. And, of course, the
novelty of the Carter Doctrine comes from the comparatively minor
political and military involvement by the U.S. in the Gulf prior to 1979-a
point that frequently leaves today's students (whose formative years are
after 2001) baffled that there would be some part of the world in which
the U.S. had not been actively involved.
There is no shortage of scholarly literature on Persian Gulf-area politics
and U.S. relations with particular countries in the region. The focus of
this body of work, however, is largely on bilateral relations, the
importance of petroleum, or the larger Near East/Southwest Asia region
beyond just the Gulf. The conventional perception largely holds that the
U.S. discovered the Persian Gulf in World War II, but kept its postwar
relationship confined largely to petroleum extraction from Saudi Arabia,
Iran and Iraq while Britain remained the dominant power in the Gulf region
through the 1960s. Accordingly, the U.S. only became more involved in the
region in the late 1970s with the Carter Doctrine, and intensified its
involvement in the decades since then. Detailed analyses of the U.S.
military interactions with the Gulf region itself, aside from the Persian
Gulf War of 1990-1991, are comparatively few in number. This is
remarkable given the longstanding presence of the U.S. Navy in the region,
the ongoing role of naval officers as diplomats, and the importance of the
maritime trade that flows through the Gulf and around the Arabian
peninsula.
Motivated by this gap in the literature and his own experiences in the
region, Jeffrey R. Macris, a Permanent Military Professor at the United
States Naval Academy, has crafted a narrative overview of the evolution of
first British and then United States military involvement in the region
since the early nineteenth century. Deliberately eschewing a focused
analysis and interpretation of particular incidents in the region, Captain
Macris sought to bridge several different disciplines in an attempt to
answer questions about the long-term military engagement of these two
powers with the Gulf. Several concerns drove his inquiry, including why
British and the U.S military forces (rather than diplomats alone) were
drawn to the Gulf region, how these successive powers used military force
to maintain order and protect their strategic interests there, the causes
of the British disengagement with the region and the reluctance of the
U.S. to enter it militarily, and the similarities and differences between
U.S. and British aims in the Gulf.
The reviewers are generally in praise of the coverage Macris offers of the
post-World War II period and the emphasis on security, though they wish
that he had explored certain aspects in greater detail or with a closer
eye to the larger contextual connections to issues outside of the region.
As the U.S. enters a new era of military realignment and fiscal austerity,
the issues of naval diplomacy, maritime security, power projection, and
the temptations of military withdrawal that are raised in this work are
ones that American leaders will have to consider carefully.
Participants:
Captain Jeffrey R. Macris, USN is a Permanent Military Professor at the
United States Naval Academy, where he teaches Middle Eastern history and
military history. He holds a Ph.D. in Middle East Studies from the School
of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University, as well as
a linguist certificate in Arabic from the Defense Language Institute. A
resident of the Persian Gulf for many years, he has travelled extensively
in the region and served as officer-in-charge of an operational U.S. Navy
aviation squadron detachment in Bahrain.
Jonathan Reed Winkler is Associate Professor of History at Wright State
University in Dayton, Ohio. He is a historian of U.S. diplomatic,
military and naval history, and international affairs in the modern era.
He is the author of Nexus: Strategic Communications and American Security
in World War I (Harvard, 2008). He is presently working on a book-length
examination of U.S. national security policy and international
communications technology across the twentieth century.
Simon Davis is Associate Professor of History at Bronx Community College,
City University of New York. He is a historian of the Persian Gulf,
imperialism and colonialism, transnational and global history. He is the
author of Contested Space: Anglo-American Relations in the Persian Gulf,
1939-1947 (Brill, 2009).
Mark Rice was most recently an instructor at Minnesota State University,
Mankato. He holds a doctoral degree in history from the Ohio State
University, with a field in diplomatic and international history. His
dissertation is entitled "The Alliance City: NATO and Berlin, 1958-1963."
He received his M.A. degree from Ohio University, through the Contemporary
History Institute, and his B.A. (Honours) from the University of Toronto.
David F. Winkler is the Historian with the Naval Historical Foundation in
Washington, D.C. A specialist on the Cold War, he is the author of
several historical studies for the Department of Defense, including Amirs,
Admirals, and Desert Sailors: Bahrain, the U.S. Navy, and the Arabian Gulf
(Naval Institute Press, 2007). A retired U.S. naval reserve officer, he
received his Ph.D. from American University in 1998.
-----------------
Review by Simon Davis, Bronx Community College, City University of New York
The scholarly field embraced by this lively synthesis is busy, presently
crossing into the 1970s, facilitated by arbitrary British and United
States declassification schedules and the subsequent 'race to the
archives'. The resultant source-bound redactions tend to privilege
post-war British high official mentalities, which in turn has preserved
the conceit of an 'Anglo-American Middle East'. Jeffrey R. Macris's book
has this tendency, despite strong evidence, particularly economic and US
ideological, that this idea was a naïve if not deluded British hope.
Post-Second World War British elite overtures aimed at regenerating
Britain's hegemony (with American help) were admittedly persistent. But
they foundered, in all but contingent military respects, against steadfast
American refusal to embrace full-scale political, economic, and regional
system building, both in the Persian Gulf and the wider global periphery.
Commander Macris's main aim is to seek instructive indications in British
experience for future American methods of securing key Persian Gulf
interests. But to put this beyond the realm of constructive anachronism
demands recognition of why, essentially, British pre-eminence was so
inimical to American overseas policy that, despite some Vietnam-era
separation anxiety, it was cut loose in favor of prime security relations
with Iran and Saudi Arabia, whatever this may ultimately have entailed.
In many respects, how and why the British empire worked is indeed
instructive for American policy-makers, but mostly to show how, in a
cautionary sense, redemptive self-projection abroad so easily
metamorphoses into various forms of antagonistic encumbrance. Current
meditations on the meanings of empire, from right and left, embrace a wide
array of metropolitan, colonizer, subaltern, cultural, economic,
ideological and geographic perspectives.1 Macris sticks to politics and
security, which are but two relevant analytical themes, albeit in need of
new thinking. These themes however are the ones most frequently dismissed
in current post-colonial scholarship as reactionary and inauthentic to the
processes experienced by the imperialized 'other', whose voices should be
traced and included uppermost, if real understanding is to follow. The key
to the American epiphany on the Persian Gulf, during the Second World War,
is nonetheless opposition to Britain's plans for a comprehensive and
radical integration of strategic hegemony with political, economic and
social 'guided development. By 1971 the latter had evaporated for lack of
the U.S. underwriting which Britain had solicited in various forms since
the days of Lend Lease. American forms of influence were deliberately less
formal than British. But by 1991, and again in 2003, these forms of
influence nonetheless required armed intervention to sustain. Macris
explores how, from the late eighteenth century until 1971, British
dominance at limited liability might suggest a model for future United
States engagement.
But, to recapitulate, relatively few imperialisms are compatible.
Indeed, mutual competition is in their nature, unless they are faced with
a greater common threat. This is the anchor of currently- prevalent ideas
of a post-war 'Anglo-American Middle East'. Both powers are portrayed in
most discussions on the cold war-era2 as combining against the elective
affinity of Soviet intrusion and radicalized national liberation. The
Americans supposedly welcomed Britain as a senior partner that would
preserve the Persian Gulf for the West at minimum risk to themselves. Yet,
with Communist influence being generally insignificant in the Middle East,
and a substantive Soviet presence late, uneven and ephemeral, such
orthodoxies hide in plain sight the demise of regionally integrative,
sterling-based British neo-imperialism. The latter project has now almost
been forgotten because of the very totality of its extinction - in favor
of US-mandated nation-building (or at least nation-state fabrication) and
multilateral relations within what American visionaries, from the era of
Franklin Roosevelt to George W. Bush, lauded in varying words as a new
international order based on expectations for a 'free world'. .
The compelling historical question is not how Britain and the United
States formed a condominium against a barely-existent Soviet threat -
which they did not. Rather, it is how local rulers disengaged from British
tutelage to seek modernized sovereignty and legitimacy on less
subordinated American terms. American encouragement for a residual British
military presence coinciding with 'overstretch' in Korea and Vietnam,
never extended to, and indeed categorically disavowed, British schemes for
post-colonial civil and developmental patronage. Later, unforeseen
disequilibria, sub-(and supra) national resistance and local inter-state
conflicts, as Commander Macris shows, drew in the United States, against
its oft-repeated better judgment. But American policy did not embrace
British imperialist methods. Rather, it advanced heterogeneous desiderata
for a new liberal capitalist world order, ending old European empires, as
triumphantly celebrated in the months between the Eastern bloc's collapse
and Iraq's invasion of Kuwait in 1990. In entering the same geographic
space as Britain's erstwhile sphere, and having superficially similar
interest in oil, finance, and political intimacy with the Persian Gulf's
dynastic rulers, U.S. engagement has invariably been identified with
British imperial mentalities and functions - an 'American Orientalism'.
This, simply put, is wrong: the sine qua non of American internationalism
was to dismantle any British control over Persian Gulf relations with the
world at large and any exclusionary and locally prejudicial constraints
thereby entailed.
Yet a beguiling irony, signified in the Persian Gulf by its withdrawal of
standing armed forces in 1971, followed Britain's painful divestiture from
the trappings, harness and servants of formal empire, which was signified
in the Persian Gulf by its withdrawal of standing armed forces in 1971. By
this time related units, bases, and protectorates had long been an
economically disembodied and politically irrelevant rump. But, thereafter,
British influence and interests mounted a remarkable, not to say
profitable, comeback. This was, however, under the 'open door' terms of
reference set by the Americans. Britain did trade on past acquaintance
with princely regimes but more as finance broker, real estate developer,
and court bouncer than as hegemon. A buccaneering City of London spirit,
transmitted to peripheral out-stations, revived the 'gentlemanly
capitalism' of pre-colonial British imperialism in and around the Indian
Ocean basin. Nonetheless, as Macris shows, essential Persian Gulf security
had to be underwritten by United States military resources and American
willingness to commit them. Moreover, this congenial role-reversal
sometimes required Britain to deploy force contingents as loss-leaders
sufficient to encourage the United States beyond hitherto dubious
thresholds of intervention. How such capabilities will survive the current
fiscal crisis and strategic defence reviews may signify the true ending,
with a whimper, of British imperialism, long past the colonial empire's
end.
Seeing longer-term currents over momentary official discourse is crucial
to establishing the context and implications for contemporary political
choices. Macris's book attempts this by surveying British experience in
the Persian Gulf since the 1790s, then American engagement after the
Second World War. Everyone who reads it will discover new things, its
pertinent and exciting archive photographs being but one example. On the
other hand, the book can be narrow in its secondary source synthesis and
theoretical scope. It should probably be read alongside recent works by
James Onley and Robert Blyth. They emphasize the quasi-autonomous Indian
orientation of the British presence, and its material minimalism, rather
than coherent grand designs directed from London3. Macris also rehearses
certain commonplaces which it is the historian's duty to debunk: he writes
that Indian forces upheld British Middle Eastern security [pp. 5, 24-27,
33, 88, 247] (true to a point, but they were largely withheld from
systemically significant roles in peacetime outside India after 1921,
leaving the way open for Royal Air Force airpower); he also asserts that
Nazi Germany [pp. 39-40] saw the Middle East as a grand strategic
objective (Hitler was half-heartedly drawn in by Italian failure and tried
to restrain Rommel's quixotic ambitions once in); he goes on to imply the
early Cold War [pp. 83-86] as replicating the Kipling-era Anglo-Russian
great game (here Britain initially sought pragmatic deals with Stalin on
demarcated spheres of influence, notably in Iran in 1945-46, until the
Truman administration vetoed such horse-trading on the principle of
preserving Iranian nation-statehood against all comers); finally, he
comments [p.169] that the British intelligence and special forces' role in
putting Sultan Qaboos on Oman's throne in 1970 is not clear in existing
literature (-it is).4
Without going through every point, the book's omissions are most notable
with respect to indigenous Gulf affairs, imperial history writ large,
deeper reference to economic, social and cultural formation, and the role
of other great powers, for example China, which in showing itself eager to
play a role in the concluding phases of the Iran-Iraq War, was
instrumental in accelerating pre-emptive US Naval commitment to the
defense of Kuwaiti merchant shipping, thereby averting both the collapse
of Iraq and Iran's impending victory. Overall, the book resembles a
transcribed lecture series - full of fascinating nuggets, and very good on
naval issues and on micro-experience, for example from Royal Naval
logbooks and Britain's Gulf agencies. Rather than addressing
'Anglo-American hegemony' it discretely surveys Britain's heyday and
departure, announced in 1968, posits a 'chaotic interregnum' between 1972
and 1991, and then, in comparably discrete terms, sometimes very
anecdotal, examines United States regional peacemaking thereafter. Having
advanced nation-building and multilateralism, U.S. fortunes are described
as being thereby put, with grave consequences, at the mercy of Persian
Gulf client-allies who were vulnerable to knowable but underestimated
indigenous challenges.. This seems right, as is Macris's follow-up on the
imperceptive, doctrinaire U.S. techniques used in the region, which
culminated in renewed war in 2003 and its entangling, troubled aftermath.
For Macris a better posture than the ponderous standing forces retained
after Desert Storm would be, like the one he attributes to Britain, a
discreet diplomatic presence, a big stick over the horizon in the form of
the U.S. Navy, with prepositioned resources near potential intervention
points. This formula will doubtless be advanced by the Navy and its
friends, post-Iraq. Citing Britain's 1961 'Operation Vantage' in Kuwait as
an example to follow, Macris implies not so much that U.S. approaches
resemble those of the British but that they should. Whether this could
adequately redress shifting macro-level and local currents on terms
favorable to the United States as the 'last superpower' may be something
of a great white hope. Britain has been subject since 1945 to diminishing
military and political returns in the global periphery. It responded,
perforce, by informalizing its presence. Profitable intercourse was
sustained by developing commonality with collaborative elements at all
levels, setting up institutions that were integrated with British
interests, which were themselves culturally reconstructed around
political-economic partnerships with various 'others', even in the
metropolis itself, on relatively pragmatic terms: some old friends were
abandoned. In this context, the main American problem might be less that
of overseas threats than domestically-internalized ideologies on the world
and how to address it.
Notes
1 See Robin Butlin, Geographies of Empire: European Empires and Colonies
c.1880-1960, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009); V. Chaturvedi,
(ed.) Mapping Subaltern Studies and the Post-Colonial, (London: Verso,
2000); Niall Ferguson, Empire: the Rise and Demise of the British World
Order and the Lessons for Global Power, (London: Allen Lane, 2002); Fawaz
Gerges, 'The Study of Middle East International Relations: a Critique',
British Journal of Middle East Studies, 18, 2, (1991); Robert J.C. Young,
Postcolonialism: an Historical Introduction (Oxford: Blackwell, 2001).
2 Steve Marsh, Anglo-American Relations and Cold War Oil: Crisis in Iran,
(Basingstoke, 2003), 3-7, 52; Gabriel Kolko, Confronting the Third World:
United States Foreign Policy, 1945-1980 (New York, 1988), 13, 18-32. On
the West versus radical-Soviet 'elective affinity' see David Painter,
'Explaining US Relations with the Third World', Diplomatic History, 19,
(1995), 525-48. Also, David R. Devereux, Formulation of British Defence
Policy towards the Middle East, 1948-1956 (New York, 1990), 12-13, 15, 19;
Peter L. Hahn, The United States, Great Britain, and Egypt, 1945-1956:
Strategy and Diplomacy in the Early Cold War (Chapel Hill, NC, 1991), 19,
49-55; Mary Ann Heiss, Empire and Nationhood: The United States, Great
Britain, and Iranian Oil, 1950-1954 (New York, 1997), 3, 8, 9, sees US
support for Britain against Iran; Charles Kupchan, The Persian Gulf and
the West: The Dilemmas of Security (Boston, 1987), 10-43; Douglas Little,
American Orientalism: The United States and the Middle East Since 1945
(Chapel Hill, NC, 2003), 4-8, 11, 119-23; W. Taylor Fain, American
Ascendance and British Retreat in the Persian Gulf Region (Basingstoke,
2008) 11, 201-8.
3 James Onley, The Arabian Frontier of the British Raj: Merchants, Rulers,
and the British in the Nineteenth Century Gulf (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2007); Robert Blyth, The Empire of the Raj: India, Eastern Africa
and the Middle East, 1858-1947 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003).
4 On Oman, Stephen Dorril, MI6: Inside the Covert world of Her Majesty's
Secret Intelligence Service, (New York: Simon and Shuster, 2000), 729-734.
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Review by Mark Rice, Minnesota State University, Mankato
It is at once both refreshing and perplexing for a book of diplomatic
history to have the phrase Anglo-American in its title without the phrase
"Special Relationship" appearing in the text. Refreshing because it seems
as though authors who write about diplomacy involving the two countries
feel the need to emphasize the specialness of the relationship, even when
it does not seem so special. And perplexing because it would seem that the
subject of Jeffrey Macris' The Politics and Security of the Gulf would be
perfectly suited for an examination of the Special Relationship, given the
close cooperation of Britain and the United States in the Persian Gulf
region. Yet Macris' study of the role of the Anglo-American hegemony in
the Gulf from the nineteenth century on focuses more on the tensions
between the powers, especially as the British Empire declined and left a
vacuum in the Gulf in the face of the Soviet Cold War threat. The Politics
and Security of the Gulf provides an analysis of British and American
involvement that gets beyond each national story, and looks at the
combination of interests that produced a hegemonic relationship between
the West and the Middle East.
The book's strongest point is its scope. Rather than focusing on
particular key events in the region, Macris takes a wide view of the
history of Anglo-American involvement in the Persian Gulf, beginning with
the early British incursions as part of the protection of their
communications with India, and continuing up to the present-day wars on
terrorism and in Iraq. This scope allows Macris to draw out his main
ideas, particularly those that concern the stabilizing effect of British
(and later) American intervention among the Gulf nations. By combining
diplomatic skill, political incentives (often in the form of treaties),
and occasionally naval force, Britain was able to eliminate piracy and
other lawless activities, reduce discord between the various tribes along
the Gulf coast, and establish protectorates that provided British
interests (especially oil interests starting at the turn of the twentieth
century) with the stability they needed (12-13, 22). By the time the
American government began to increase its involvement during the Second
World War, Britain had already developed a set of practices and
institutions that supported and perpetuated that stability - practices and
institutions that could conflict with American ideas and approaches (43).
The main focus of the book, though, is on the post-war period, when
Britain found itself retreating from its empire, and the United States
found itself expanding its influence in order to contain Soviet communism.
The growing need for Mid-East oil and the desire to keep the Soviet Union
from interfering in its supply to the West meant that as the British
Empire retreated, the stability it had created in the Persian Gulf was
still necessary, and thus both Britain and the United States saw a
continued British role as vital (82). The costs of that role, however,
were not small, and they climbed as elements within the region rebelled
against the British presence through the 1950s and 1960s. As a result, by
the end of the 1960s, the British government had come to the conclusion
that it could not remain East of Suez, a decision that surprised and upset
both the Americans and the local rulers in the Gulf.
With the United States mired in Vietnam and reluctant to pick up any new
commitments, the vacuum left by the British withdrawal in 1971 remained
unfilled for nearly twenty years (202). It is in this period that Macris
finds the strongest confirmation of the need for outside hegemony in the
Persian Gulf. He argues that the disorder and instability that the British
left behind unsettled the region, leading to the oil shocks of the 1970s,
the fall of the Shah in Iran, the Iran-Iraq War, and Iraq's invasion of
Kuwait. It was only once the United States decided to reestablish the
hegemony, under its leadership, that stability returned to the Persian
Gulf (235-236). American hegemony therefore has to continue in order to
prevent another "chaotic interregnum" from throwing the region into
turmoil once again.
Macris makes good use of sources, digging particularly deeply into the
British and American national archives, and supplementing them with
published documents from Gulf countries. He also draws on his own
experiences serving as a naval officer in the region, giving his arguments
a unique and effective perspective on the issues. Drawing on these sources
allows Macris to offer a strong analysis of the reasons and methods behind
the Anglo-American hegemony. Moving beyond the standard view centered on
the importance of oil, Macris emphasizes that neither Britain nor the
United States sought to dominate the Gulf and its resources as heavily as
they did (and do). Instead, the British sent their first warships and
diplomats into the region because piracy and disorder were threatening the
trade routes through the Suez Canal to India. (12-13) For much of their
time there, the British resisted getting too deeply involved in local
affairs, preferring to use local residents and the occasional military
expedition to keep order. Likewise, once the British departed, the
Americans were reluctant to control the region directly, preferring to
rely on Iran and Saudi Arabia as the local policemen under the Nixon
Doctrine. (174-175) Yet the importance of the region, in particular its
oil, meant that neither Britain nor the United States could completely
neglect their roles in the Gulf, and when necessary, they were ready to
step in to maintain the requisite security. By focusing his story more on
security than on oil, Macris is able to add complexity to his analysis of
the development of the Anglo-American hegemony.
Yet the focus on security also overshadows other aspects of the
involvement, namely the negative side of the hegemonic relationship.
Certainly, Macris covers the conflict between nationalist groups
throughout the larger Middle East region, and the difficulties that they
posed for British authorities through the 1950s and 1960s. Macris' view of
the British presence in the Gulf is almost entirely positive; the British
provided security, prosperity, and other benefits like education. That
positive view, however, runs counter to how many residents of the region
regarded the British, and often the Americans, and was itself the cause of
considerable instability, instability that Macris curiously de-emphasizes.
For example, the British campaign to hold on to Aden against nationalists
in Yemen shared many characteristics of other brutal colonial campaigns of
the time, yet Macris barely mentions the conduct of the Yemeni campaign.
(133-134) Similarly, he downplays issues like racism among British
officials. This view of British colonialism runs counter to the current
historiography that highlights the endemic racism, paternalism, and
exploitation that often defined the British presence in places like India,
Africa, and the Persian Gulf.1 If Macris were to extend his view of
British imperialism beyond its role in security, he would likely find a
more nuanced appreciation of the difficulties that the British faced in
trying to hold the area East of Suez.
Macris' book is aimed at providing readers with a greater understanding of
the history of the Persian Gulf, and how the two powers shaped the region.
(2) Since it is unlikely that the West will stop having a role in the
Persian Gulf in the near future, he includes some policy advice for
Anglo-American leaders in the twenty-first century, based on British
success before World War II and American success between the Gulf War and
September 11. His general recommendation of keeping a modest naval force
in the region while being prepared to use heavier ground forces if
necessary sounds both prudent and effective, however, it is unclear
whether what worked for Britain under the Empire would work for the United
States in a globalized century. For example, his recommendations overlook
one of his most cogent arguments expressed earlier in the book, when he
notes that much of the rise of anti-British nationalism came in the wake
of significant demographic changes in the countries surrounding the Gulf,
when they went from small, mostly illiterate populations to large,
educated, and more prosperous ones (119-121). One wonders how the United
States would be able to imitate the role of the British in the late
nineteenth and early twentieth centuries - when populations numbered in
the tens of thousands - in the twenty-first century, when populations
number in the millions. If the American presence in the Gulf becomes too
imperial, local opinion may turn against it no matter how much security it
provides, and American leaders may face the same consequences that British
leaders did.
Still, The Politics and Security of the Gulf is focused on security
issues, and there it excels. Macris fully appreciates the local conditions
that both drew in and forced out the British and Americans. His analysis
of the relationship between British imperialism in India and that in the
Persian Gulf reveals a crucial path not taken by British leaders after
World War II, and allows him to offer trenchant criticism for their not
having taken that path. Finally, he recognizes that while ensuring
stability the in the Gulf was never easy, nor will it be in the future, it
was often necessary, and will certainly be so in the twenty-first century
as well.
Notes
1 See for example, Piers Brendon, The Decline and Fall of the British
Empire (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2008), 505-515, including far more
detailed coverage of Britain's campaign against nationalists in Aden.
-----------------
Review by David F. Winkler, Naval Historical Foundation
When I was recalled to active duty in 1998 by Commander Fifth Fleet to
write a study on the history of the Navy in Bahrain,1 (I sought out a good
macro-history of great power involvement in the Gulf. The best I could
find was Michael A. Palmer's On Course to Desert Storm: The United States
in the Persian Gulf.2 published in 1992 by the Naval Historical Center.
Jeffrey R. Macris, a professor of history at the United States Naval
Academy, has done much to fill a void with Politics and Security of the
Gulf: Anglo-American Hegemony and the Shaping of a Region. Of course,
with the sun never setting on the British Empire in the nineteenth and
first half of the twentieth centuries, and the subsequent rise of American
power, the book's sub-title could apply to several other areas of the
globe!
This fairly comprehensive overview of British and American involvement in
the Gulf follows a traditional political-military perspective drawn mostly
from archival and previously published sources within the two subject
nations. Macris does not seem to have done interviews which could have
provided additional insights for the concluding chapters where many
sources are still classified. There is very little input from the Persian
or Arab perspective.
He uses a chronological approach using seven chapters with the first
chapter covering the British legacy in the Gulf up until World War II.
That only a dozen pages cover British activity in the nineteenth century
is by far the book's biggest disappointment. Basically, Macris argues
that the British successfully maintained order in the Gulf with nominal
sea power which drew upon colonial forces from India. Besides not
providing a more detailed historical narrative about British naval and
diplomatic actions, Macris misses an opportunity to provide additional
background on the various ruling families in the region that would rule
various states in the twentieth century.
Discussion of American involvement is limited. There is no mention of
American naval activities in the region such as arrival of USS Peacock and
USS Boxer at Muscat to negotiate a treaty on September 21, 1833
establishing diplomat ties, or Persian attempts in 1855 to negotiate a
treaty that called for American protection of Persian shipping and
coastlines. Macris notes the presence of missionaries in passing.
Michael B. Oren's Power, Faith, and Fantasy: America in the Middle East -
1776 to the Present3does an admirable job in detailing the work of these
missionaries in the establishment of educational and medical institutions
in the region (the American University Cairo, Beirut; the American
Missionary Hospital in Bahrain, etc.) that would foster independent
intellectual thinking that would become the underpinning of nationalists
movements. Oren's work, which is not cited in the Macris bibliography, was
thin in its post-1950 coverage. In contrast, Macris's narrative from World
War II into the 1990s is this book's strength.
As the U.S. Marines demonstrated sixty years ago at the Chosin Reservoir,
retreat is one of the more difficult and challenging of military
maneuvers. Thus, Macris's chapter "Britain births a new Gulf order,
1968-71" covering the British departure from "East of Suez" gets high
marks for offering an overview of the challenges that followed the 1968
withdrawal announcement. Overall, Britain did about as much as it could
to leave the region in some semblance of order.
Over a decade ago when I interviewed Vice Admiral Marmaduke G. Bayne, the
Middle East Force Commander who in 1971 negotiated for facilities in
Bahrain at the former HMS Juffair and at the airport, about the American
position during this time period, he explained that the three courses of
action the United States could have taken were either to withdraw with the
British, maintain a minimal presence, or fill the void left by the
British. As Macris documents, the United States chose the second option
due to other global commitments and the hope that Iran and Saudi Arabia
could serve as American proxies in the region. Bayne would argue that in
retrospect, the United States should have immediately moved to fill the
void. As it was, the arrival of USS LaSalle represented a significant
upgrade as the Middle East Force Flagship, and the French Navy also
contributed to a western naval presence in the region.
Bayne claimed that the accomplishment he was most proud of was giving
solid footing to the Bahrain International School as a Department of
Defense-run institution that would not only educate the dependents of
sailors assigned to the Middle East, but would educate many of the elites
of the region. "In my opinion it was far more important to establish that
school as an American-run school exerting foundational American culture in
the region through education than running a few destroyers around the Gulf
and Indian Ocean."4
Bayne may have been correct. Later in the narrative, Macris argues that
the ruling Khalifa family can point to the American presence in Bahrain as
helping to bolster their Sunnifamily-led rule over a Shia majority
population. However, it could also be argued that the American presence
and support for institutions such as The Bahrain International School have
helped to foster democratic reforms. Educated at the Bahrain
International School and in the United States and Britain, the current
Crown Prince Shaikh Salman bin Hamad Al Khalifa appreciates the tenets of
democracy and has become a pivotal character in the ongoing dialogue that
pits his aging grand-uncle, the Prime Minister Shaihk Khalifah, against a
populace that had hoped that the National Action Charter approved in 2001
would give them a greater say in their governance.
It has been said that the presence of the school was one of the reasons
that the Bahrainis were reluctant to evict the Americans in the 1970s.
Eventually, the Americans were evicted - on paper. However, the facilities
remained as a 'secret base' under the innocuous title "Administrative
Support Unit" [(ASU) - dubbed by sailors as "Alcohol Support Unit"] and
the school remained.
Although Macris seems to minimize this presence, claiming that the U.S.
had no bases in the Gulf during the 1980s, the fact remains that without
the American facilities in Bahrain - especially at the Bahrain
International Airport which hosted a helicopter detachment known as the
Desert Ducks - it would have been almost impossible to have sustained the
"Earnest Will" convoy escort operations.
Macris skillfully summarizes events in the region from Desert Storm to the
present with mention of the rise of anti-American resentment in Saudi
Arabia in the 1990s that led to two major bombings and the rise of Al
Qaeda. The attack on USS Cole in October 2000 at Aden is a glaring
omission to an otherwise comprehensive treatment of the period. Bringing
the book's narrative up to the present and offering analytical historical
perspective on current events does cause this historian to wince. Up
until the 1970s, the 1953 ouster of Mohammed Mossadegh in Iran was touted
as one of the Eisenhower administration's greater accomplishments -- after
1979 that view changed. Clearly, the jury is out on Iraq and Afghanistan.
Notes
1 The book was eventually published in 2007 by the Naval Institute under
the title Amirs, Admirals and Desert Sailors.
2 Michael A. Palmer, On Course to Desert Storm: The United States in the
Persian Gulf (Naval Historical Center, 1992).
3 Michael B. Oren, Power, Faith, and Fantasy: America in the Middle East -
1776 to the Present (W.W. Norton & Co., 2007).
4 Personal interview by David Winkler with Vice Admiral Marmaduke G.
Bayne, USN (retired), 16 July and 26 August 1998.
-----------------
Author's Response by Jeffrey R. Macris, United States Naval Academy
First, a gracious thanks to Professor Jonathan Winkler for selecting this
book for an H-Diplo roundtable review, and to Drs. Davis, Rice, and
Winkler for their thoughtful comments. Their critiques were thorough,
fair, and sincere, and I am grateful for the opportunity to respond.
The timing of this roundtable allowed for a revisiting of The Politics and
Security of the Gulf, which had largely lain on the shelf since it was set
in type in 2009. Three years later, as I pen this response, Washington's
leaders find themselves enmeshed in a fierce budget imbroglio that looks
eerily like that of the British in the late 1960s. After the upcoming
presidential elections, U.S. political leaders late in 2012 face a
so-called "fiscal cliff" that may require over half a trillion dollars in
higher taxes and/or reductions in defense and other government programs.
With a mature economy exhibiting anemic growth, many Americans today wish
to curtail defense spending in order to devote more resources to domestic
social programs, just as the Labour Party desired for Britain over four
decades ago. To downsize its military budget, London found -- as
Washington may also find in the second decade of the twenty-first century
- that a superpower must curtail the breadth of its commitments. This
financial belt-tightening underlay Britain's withdrawal from "East of
Suez," one of the central subjects of this book, which led to London's
cutting-and-running from the Gulf in the 1970s, an abdication that ushered
in a period of rising Gulf tension and violence. Today, there exist
leaders in Washington who argue for a similar sharp military drawdown from
the Middle East. With American newspapers publishing headlines that look
remarkably like those in Britain in the late 1960s, it was refreshing to
review some of the themes and questions that The Politics and Security of
the Gulf poses.
I appreciate the positive aspects of the reviewers' comments. As Rice
notes, the typical tenor of most historical analysis on London and
Washington's defense ties is the oft-cited "special relationship." From
the beginning of this study into these two superpowers' involvement in the
Gulf after World War II, however, I found that the two states' national
interests often diverged, leading to tension between them, a subject that
serves as a sub-theme for the book. In fact, an earlier working title was
"The Anglo-American Gulf," a double-entendre that suggested not just that
these two superpowers have dominated the affairs of the region for
decades, which they have, but also that a "gulf" at times separated their
policies there. The editors at Routledge, however, thought the title too
ambiguous and dropped it, although the emphasis in the text on the
differences between the two states' policies in the Gulf has remained.
In this roundtable the readers also comment, generally positively, upon
the chronological reach of the book, which stretches from the early 1800s
up to the present day. Rice remarks, in fact, that the book's strongest
point is its scope. This broad brush allows one to see what brought
Britain to the region long before oil became king. The strategic location
of the region, lying at the junction of three continents, and athwart the
air, sea, and land lines of communication that bind their residents, has
for centuries attracted the great powers. Only by looking back a couple of
centuries can one understand how and why Great Britain became deeply
involved there: to keep open the transit lanes to India by quelling tribal
feuding and suppressing piracy. The earliest manuscript of The Politics
and Security of the Gulf, however, started chronologically with World War
II and ended with Desert Storm, the event that effectively marked the
United States' assumption of security duties there. For the foresight and
wisdom of commencing the account back in the 1800s and stretching it up to
the present, I must pass credit to Routledge editor Joe Whiting, who
believed it important to put this story in a proper long-range framework.
The opening and closing chapters, therefore, exist primarily for context.
Like the reviewers, however, I wish there existed more room in these short
chapters for details. In that vein, I concur with David Winkler that it
would have been nice to include in the introductory pages more details
concerning early American missionaries' work in the Gulf, for example, or
nineteenth-century U.S. naval visits there. But because these didn't
further the central theses of the book, I chose not to address them.
Likewise, in the final chapter on "American Peace and American War," one
could write volumes. But the goal there was to bring the book up to the
present in a condensed fashion. As Winkler notes, asking a historian to
compile an account of recent events causes him or her to "wince," which
was exactly how I greeted this task from Routledge. I didn't like cramming
into one small diminutive chapter the years from 1991 to today; many
important issues got compressed, and some were left out altogether. In the
short section that describes the growing Arab hostility to the lingering
post-Desert Storm American presence, for example, the book should have
included a discussion of the bombing in Yemen of the USS Cole, which I
omitted; as one reviewer comments, it was a "glaring" omission, and I
concur.
To my mind, a good history book ought to offer lessons for those living in
the present, and I tried to proffer some in The Politics and Security of
the Gulf. Looking toward current strategic doctrine for London and
Washington, for example, the book suggests the broad outlines of a
successful military policy for the region. Drawing from my interpretation
of the British experience, I suggest that the United States project power
to the region primarily with its Navy, which as navies allow, permits a
nation to influence events without placing large numbers of military
personnel ashore. In addition, the book argues for a robust fast reaction
land force, which could deploy on short notice to pre-positioned materials
and land facilities in friendly coastal Gulf states. This suggestion is
not particularly new or revolutionary; it was (without the prepositioning
gear) the strategy of the British through most of the 1800s, and as the
book recounts, it was the policy that the British adopted shortly after
Iraq threatened the newly-independent state of Kuwait in the early 1960s.
It is also the same policy that the United States stumbled onto after the
chaotic events of the 1970s, apparently without recognizing the similarity
to previous British doctrine.
One reviewer questions the efficacy of such a policy, specifically whether
what worked for Britain in previous decades will necessarily work for the
Americans today. Might not an overly imperial American presence engender a
local backlash? This is a reasonable concern. Perhaps the book might have
been more explicit in recommending locations for potential U.S. support
facilities in the region. Inside the Gulf's two Arab regional powers --
Iraq and Saudi Arabia - the presence of foreign military might throughout
the twentieth century gave rise to public concerns of loss of sovereignty;
over the long term, in the future it would be more advantageous to the
United States if Saudi and Iraqi allies did not have to face the hostile
scrutiny of critics who charge that the ruling regimes prostrate
themselves to the West. But, especially behind closed doors, Arab
diplomats from the smaller Gulf emirates through history have welcomed and
encouraged the presence of the West and its military might. Surrounded by
hostile larger neighbors, these small emirates have good cause to continue
to fear the power of those around them. It is in these small Arab
emirates, then, that the U.S. should build its support facilities, aiming
to keep its presence as small as possible, however, so as to avoid a
possible backlash.
Rice notes a tendency to gloss over anti-British sentiments in the region,
citing specifically the book's insufficient attention to the insurgency in
Yemen in the 1960s. While writing the book I struggled for a considerable
amount of time over the proper treatment of the Yemeni conflict and
subsequent British pull-out from Aden. I thought then - as today - that
the subject was adequately covered in a balanced fashion. To highlight the
importance of the subject, I purchased from a commercial source the
publication rights for the photo on page 133 of two agitated British
soldiers, one pointing his gun at an unarmed Yemeni youth; the petrified
young boy, crying, pushes the barrel away. That photo cost several hundred
dollars, nearly double that of any other. It was worth it, however, in
that it captured the horrific nature of that insurgency, which ultimately
led to Great Britain's withdrawal from Aden. One of the great challenges,
I suppose, of writing a book with a broad chronological sweep is striking
a proper balance among all of the different historical events that
comprise it. In this case I thought I had it right, but others would
argue, that the anti-British insurgency in Yemen deserved more emphasis.
That is an honest difference of opinion that I accept.
Another reviewer astutely notes the paucity in The Politics and Security
of the Gulf of information gleaned from personal interviews. The shunning
of oral interviews was my conscious choice, dictated by a desire not to
run afoul of national rules governing research with human subjects. At the
time I was writing the book I watched from afar as a colleague's work
ground to a standstill when his research, at a different academic
institution, came under the hostile scrutiny of that school's Human
Research Protection Program. It was a mess, and it led to dozens of hours
of administrative work on his part, and a delay of several months in his
writing. Rather than face the specter of the same thing happening to me, I
made a conscious decision to limit my sources to archival documents,
published document collections, and secondary sources.. It was the right
decision at the time, although it undoubtedly limited the resources that I
could draw upon. Since that time my ongoing research has received the
blessing of my home institution's Institutional Review Board. As an aside,
I might note that many in the historians' trade have decried the oversight
of oral history as an undue burden and a mismatch from the intent of
federal statutes concerning research with human subjects; there is a
chance that within the next couple of years all oral/written interviews
will be exempted from regulatory oversight. For a full discussion, see
the Oral History Association's web page:
http://www.oralhistory.org/do-oral-history/oral-history-and-irb-review/
Finally, in one of his observations, Davis comments on the fact that,
despite the inclusion of the term in the book's subtitle, the subject of
"Anglo-American hegemony" is not directly addressed as a conscious,
ongoing collusion between the two superpowers in the Gulf. He is right:
the term is not used in that fashion. As the book argues, the
Anglo-American hegemonic presence in the Gulf is a serial one, with the
British taking the leading role through 1971. Although arriving in the
Gulf in World War II, the Americans were happy to allow, and in fact
encouraged, the British in the post-war years to lead in the region for as
long as possible. It was only after two decades of political and military
chaos in the Gulf in the 1970s and 1980s that the Americans finally
assumed, in 1991 after Desert Storm, the hegemonic role that Britain had
abdicated two decades before.
I pass along my sincere thanks to the coordinator of these roundtable
reviews as well as all of the reviewers. With American leaders currently
engaged in a national debate over how large a share of its national
treasure the U.S. military should consume, a dialog that resembles that of
the British prior to their abandonment of the Gulf, I hope that this
discussion will prove fruitful in shedding some light into the West's
involvement in this crucial region, along with the potential perils of a
precipitate withdrawal from it.
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